How Much Should You Pay Usability Test Users?
July 8th, 2005
The other day,Gerry McGovern popped me a message with the email:
If you’re recruiting people for usability, what typically do you pay them “for their time”?
The short answer is “What is their time worth to you?” After all, these folks are helping you create the design you need. How valuable is their information? (If it’s not valuable, why are you wasting your time?)
The medium answer is that it depends on many factors:
In one study we did recently, we paid some users as much as $1,700 for the 3-hour session. We were asking them to use that money to buy the laptop computer of their dreams. (Many actually purchased laptops that were more expensive than the money we gave them.)
$1,700 is extremely high for a 3-hour session. Most users can get much less than that. The long answer is what we wrote in our report, Recruiting without Fear:
At some point in the planning process, you’ll have to decide how much to pay each participant you recruit. A lot depends on your budget — but you should offer them something. Many companies that undertake usability testing pay participants in cash, often between $25 and $50 per hour. Other companies give away gifts. For example, Microsoft typically doesn’t pay participants cash, but gives them their choice of select Microsoft software.
Whether you pay in cash or in mugs and caps, the fee is symbolic. These sessions are hard work, and you will be asking a lot of each participant. It would be easy for people to conclude that whatever you can afford to pay them is too low for what they contribute, and they would be right. Unless the session itself is the motivator, no amount of money will make it work.
Even though most qualified participants want to take part, busy people still like to hear why you want them for a particular session. They also want to know what they’ll get out of the experience. You can tell them:
“Your colleagues are working on this product.” “You’ll meet the developers producing the designs you depend on.” “You can see, and even influence, what’s new in your field.” For some participants, it makes all the difference just to know that their contribution will count.
In a recent intranet test, we didn’t pay the users anything. (We did offer them a beverage of their choice, but none took us up on the offer.) Instead, the real reward for the users was (a) time away from their day-to-day jobs and (b) the chance to guide improvements to the much-hated internal network. We got complete cooperation just by asking nicely. Politeness is an amazingly powerful influencer!
You have to be careful about going cheap though — some people will think you don’t value your their time, thereby thinking you don’t value their opinion. As a result, they’ll refuse to participate and it will make recruiting harder, since you’ll have to talk to more potential candidates. When we do pay our users, we tend to pay higher-than-average rates because recruiting time is far more expensive than the increased remuneration fees.
p.s. Recruiting without Fear is a pretty cool resource, if someone on your team spends any time recruiting users (says a very biased co-author).
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